Episode 24: Skype

**Ben Gilbert** (0:31)
Welcome back to episode 24 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:38)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
And we are your hosts. Today's episode is Microsoft's 2011 acquisition of Skype and the wild, crazy journey that it took to get there.

**David Rosenthal** (0:48)
Ben, you mean eBay's 2005 acquisition of Skype and the wild, crazy journey it took to get there.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
Or perhaps the Silver Lake Partners private equity takeover with Andreessen Horowitz.

**David Rosenthal** (0:59)
In 2009, acquisition of Skype and the crazy path it took to get there.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:05)
All that and more as we dive into the show. Before we get started today, we want to do a community spotlight. User in Slack, Swyx, pointed us at his company, I believe it is Sentieo, sentieo.com.
They are the future of Wall Street analysts. They have a software platform where you can save time on research, join thousands of investment professionals on a modern and intuitive platform built by former Wall Street analysts. And he lets us know that they just launched their Alexa skill. So check that out if you have an Alexa or go to their website to check it out if you're interested. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:49)
So crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:15)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:20)
The other element that makes crusoe special is the environmental angle. crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
Yep. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost since crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (2:55)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:11)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired. That's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Cool. Shall we dive into the show? There's a long and rich and incredible history on this one.

**David Rosenthal** (3:34)
There is this story has more drama than something with a lot of drama. A whole lot of drama.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:42)
I don't know. A Will & Grace episode.

**David Rosenthal** (3:44)
Yeah. Sounds good. Bravo. Whatever. All right. So our drama filled story starts all the way back in 1999 when two guys, Niklas Zennström, who lived in Sweden, and janus Friis, who lived in Denmark, were both working at the Swedish telecom company Tele2. This was early days of the, well, late days of the internet bubble, but very much internet 1 bubble. And this Tele2, that's T-E-L-E number two, they wanted to launch a web portal because everybody in those days had to have a web portal and they wanted to call it Everyday. I don't know if it was everyday.com or whatever the Swedish domain term ending was at that point in time. But they had just one problem and that was that nobody could develop software at the company or at least nobody could develop good web software. And so they had a department in Estonia. Do you know where Estonia is, Ben?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:53)
I do. I do. We'll totally dive into this, but when I was at Microsoft, I was fortunate to spend a bunch of time at Skype offices and spend a week in Tallinn at the Skype headquarters there.

**David Rosenthal** (5:04)
The Skype headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia.

**Ben Gilbert** (5:06)
Beautiful city.

**David Rosenthal** (5:08)
Former Soviet block nation on the Baltic Sea.